Issue #1

PRODUCT

Messaging apps now have a bigger claim on attention than social. In this piece, Chris Messina teases out the implications of driving purchase from conversations. Exhibit A is Uber's integration with Facebook Messenger that 'listens in' for moments when you might need a ride.

Here's a great conversation between two product brains firmly anchored in making humane, delightful things. Caterina Fake (Flickr, Hunch) and Anil Dash (SixApart, ThinkUp, MakerBase) revisit terms they came up with (FOMO & JOMO respectively) as they discuss assumptions we take into our product-making.

We do something similar to this in that we try to define the core loops users really need to accomplish something, and then do the simplest version of that loop possible before we deepen any one part of the experience.

Don't give up your super large banner image! Do progressively load that image so your site doesn't look broken while it loads. @jmperezperez shows us how Medium makes their loading banner images look graceful.

DEVELOPMENT

AWS Lambda has some limitations, as you cannot install system libraries and so on, but for many problems it can be a great solution. The main problem with Lambda and API Gateway is that the usability just isn’t there, so Apex is an attempt to fix this!

Previously, installing and using React.js on a Phoenix application required ripping out brunch and replacing it with something like Webpack to get everything working, but the process has been improved significantly with the introduction of Phoenix v1.1.2 which includes a new version of Brunch that works with npm. We’ll walk through creating a new project using Phoenix v1.1.2 and getting a basic React component working and rendering on our main page.

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